Indianapolis SEO Firms: Are They Black or White Hats?

If there are good and evil forces in nature, there are also white and black hats in the search engine optimization (SEO) industry. These two are the main categories of SEO which businesses use in order to increase their ranking in search results. White hat SEO is recommended to be used instead of black hat SEO which can rake in penalties. Here are the reasons why.

When it comes to the use of meta tags, black hat SEO will simply stuff or spam them. They do nothing for the search results and search engines are always looking out for spammed meta tags. On the other hand, white hat SEO uses solid keywords or keyword phrases which accurately represent the page and uses them in the meta tags.

Black hat SEO also hides its content in many ways. Hidden content usually comes in white text full of keywords on a white background. Black hat SEO uses comment tags to hide keywords. Quality content is the aim of white hat SEO by using strong, related keyword phrases on each page. This can generate better rankings instead of hiding the content.

Linking in Indianapolis SEO can either be link farming or inbound linking. Link farming is commonly used as a black hat SEO which involves exchanging links with other websites to boost a site’s rank in search results. This is an attempt to fool the search engines into thinking that the site is more popular than it is. Inbound linking, which involves the user linking to your blog post or a page on your site within their content, must be used instead of link farming for the sake of legally boosting a site’s rank.

Page elements in Indianapolis SEO are often misused by black hat SEO. One of these is doorway pages, also known as bridge pages, entry pages, jump pages or portal pages. Black hat SEO creates these pages to spam search engines using a certain phrase. White hat SEO on the other hand, does not use doorway pages, but SEO-friendly headings such as articles that uses

,

and

tags.

Although SEO can be generally classified as black or white, there is also another classification known as the gray SEO. It may sound like a middle-ground label, but gray SEO is an ill practice which must be avoided. A successful Indianapolis SEO is the one that uses purely white hat SEO and follows all rules set by the search engines.